Negative gearing or not, property was never an easy ticket to wealth

May 14, 2026 — 5:01am

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

For a long time, property has been the default wealth-building option in Australia. Got a bit of money sitting in a bank account? Just stick it into a property. After all, so often are the phrases “rent money is dead money” or “you can’t go wrong with property” casually thrown around.

If you are now questioning whether property is worth investing in moving forward – I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. I’ve spoken to many property investors who jumped into property far too quickly and then end up sitting on under-performing investment properties for years, living in the hopes that one day, if they just hold out long enough, their returns will be realised.

This isn’t because property is a bad investment. It’s because property both as an asset and as an industry is far more complicated than most people realise. Today, I want to unpack some of those complexities. I’m hoping you’ll see that, with or without negative gearing, property was always a complicated investment option that wasn’t an easy ticket to financial freedom.

One of the significant differences between property and shares is that property isn’t considered a ‘financial product’ by Australian financial services laws the same way that products like insurances, shares or superannuation are. This........

© The Age